And look deep into nature to understand everything better. The Truth is Out There!. GGL
Huge telescopes to show what universe was like more than 13 billion years ago
By A. Pawlowski
CNN
"Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better" -- Albert Einstein
This galaxy, as seen by Hubble, is 50 million light years away. The new telescopes promise even sharper images.
1 of 3 (CNN) -- It may not be possible to travel back in time, but seeing stars and galaxies as they looked millions or even billions of years ago is no problem thanks to telescopes, the closest thing we have to time machines.
Now, astronomers are holding their breath to see what they'll observe and discover with a new generation of huge telescopes set to be built around the world.
Peering ever deeper into space and further back in time, the powerful devices will be able to show what the universe was like when it was just a few hundred million years old and emerging from a period of total darkness after the Big Bang.
"[We'll be] looking at the first generation of stars forming in the universe, which is kind of a cool idea: The time when the lights went on in the universe. There was no light before that time," said Daniel Fabricant, associate director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
His institution is one of several research organizations and universities developing the Giant Magellan Telescope, to be built in Las Campanas, Chile, by 2018.
'Eye on the sky'
Bigger is better in the world of reflecting telescopes, which rely on primary mirrors to collect light. The bigger the primary mirror, the more light it can gather and the fainter the objects astronomers can see.
The world's largest optical and infrared telescopes have primary mirrors that measure about 10 meters (32 feet) across. But the Giant Magellan Telescope will more than double that diameter, with a monster primary mirror spanning almost 25 meters (80 feet).
If the Magellan is the first new-generation star gazer to be built, it may not remain the record holder for long. Another consortium of organizations and universities is preparing to construct the aptly named Thirty Meter Telescope on the Mauna Kea summit in Hawaii, also scheduled for completion in 2018.
Big Bang 101
• The Big Bang Model is a broadly accepted theory for the origin and evolution of the universe.
• It suggests that about 13.7 billion years ago, the portion of the universe we can see today was only a few millimeters across.
• It has since expanded from this hot, dense state into the vast and much cooler cosmos we live in.
• The Big Bang did not happen at a single point in space as an "explosion."
• It is better thought of as the simultaneous appearance of space everywhere in the universe.
• The "Dark Ages," a period of time when there was no light, followed the Big Bang.
• The first objects illuminated the universe a few hundred million years later.
Source: NASA.gov Trumping them all may be the European Extremely Large Telescope, dubbed "the world's biggest eye on the sky," which is to have a primary mirror 42 meters (137 feet) in diameter and is also scheduled to start operation in 2018. No site has been chosen, though Argentina, Chile, Morocco and Spain are being considered.
Astronomers hope these giants will fill in gaps in knowledge about key moments in the early days of the universe. See some of the amazing photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope
"Right now, we can see to almost 13 billion years [back], but our best models tell us the age of the universe is almost 14 billion years, so it's this whole epoch when galaxies are actually first starting to form that we can't really see very well," said Elizabeth Barton, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, and a member of the Science Advisory Committee for the Thirty Meter Telescope.
"So the Thirty Meter Telescope will let us do things like find some of the first galaxies to form and characterize them to figure out what the conditions were actually like and how big these things were when they were forming." Blog: Will the Big Crunch follow the Big Bang?
Seeing the past
Looking so far back in time may sound like science fiction, but it's possible because light travels at a finite speed and takes a certain amount of time to get from one place to another, said Marla Geha, an assistant professor of astronomy at Yale University.
In our own cosmic neighborhood, it takes the light from the sun eight minutes to reach Earth, so when you look at a beautiful sunrise, you see the star as it appeared eight minutes ago. If the sun were to suddenly go dark, you wouldn't know it for those several minutes.
The same concept of seeing objects as they appeared in the past holds true on a much bigger scale.
Don't Miss
Blog: Will the Big Crunch follow the Big Bang?
"The light from the nearest star [outside the solar system] takes a couple of years to get to us. The light from the farthest star in the Milky Way takes 100,000 years to get to us," Geha said.
"Since the universe is about 14 billion years old, and as we're looking at things that are farther away, we're looking at light that's taken half or more than half of the age of the universe to get to us."
Some of that light is from the first stars to ever form -- fascinating to astronomers because they were probably much larger and brighter than those we find in the present-day universe, Fabricant said.
Closer to home, astronomers hope to see planets orbiting other stars -- perhaps young "Earths" in the process of formation -- and observe other solar systems, he added.
Sharper than Hubble
The pictures will likely be spectacular. Despite being ground-based, all of the next-generation telescopes promise images several times sharper than those produced by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope thanks to adaptive optics, technology that corrects for the "wiggling" of the Earth's atmosphere. Twinkling stars may be romantic to look at, but they're a big headache for astronomers trying to get a sharp picture.
One way to combat the distortion is to shoot laser beams into the sky to create fake stars and then measure how their appearance is changed by the atmosphere and take the appropriate counter-measures -- all at hundreds of times a second.
"You know what a perfect image looks like, you know what you observe, and then you know what you need to do to correct the image," Fabricant said.
"The idea is ... to have the mirror wiggle exactly opposite to take out the twinkling," Geha added.
Until the ground-based giants are built, Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, will be helping to answer key questions about the universe. Webb is scheduled to be launched in 2014, about the time Hubble's mission will end.
Operating much farther from Earth and equipped with a primary mirror more than twice the diameter of Hubble's, Webb is designed to look deeper into space to see the earliest stars and galaxies, according to NASA.
Researchers on the competing projects say there's a certain rivalry about making the big discoveries but emphasize that the most important thing is that somebody makes them.
"It's a competition where you want the other guy to succeed as well," Fabricant said.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
Distruption Toleran Networks (DTN)
"Space Internet" to Link Worlds by 2011?
Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News
July 9, 2009
For all its might, the World Wide Web is still limited to, well, our world.
But that's quickly changing with the advent of an "interplanetary internet" that planners say will revolutionize space communication.
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The Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) system, which entered another phase of testing this week, will allow astronauts to Google from the moon or tweet their observations from space.
But DTN provides far more than a connection to check your email. It's also essential for simplifying space command and control functions—such as power production or life-support systems—crucial for future space initiatives.
"You need an automated communications technology … to sustain planetary exploration on the scale that NASA and others want to perform over the next decade," said Kevin Gifford, a senior research associate at BioServe Space Technologies at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
"DTN enables the transition from a simple point-to-point network, like a walkie-talkie, to a true multimode network like the Internet."
After a decade of development DTN has advanced quickly over the past year, and NASA missions are planning to adopt the network by 2011. In November 2008 NASA test-drove the network by sending space images to and from the EPOXI spacecraft, some 20 million miles (32 million kilometers) from Earth.
DTN protocols were also installed on the International Space Station in May, and summer testing began the first week of July.
Houston, We're Fixing a Problem
Though tweeting astronauts have gotten a lot of press, "the reality is that they [don't really] tweet or have browsing capability on the International Space Station," explained Gifford, who is part of a large, cooperative DTN effort that has also included NASA and Internet veterans.
"Right now they actually voice down a simple blurb, and the tweet is operated manually from Houston," he said. In fact most current space communication involves humans manually scheduling each and every link, sometimes weeks or even months in advance for distant spacecraft, and dictating exactly which data are sent and when.
Adrian Hooke, a veteran of the Apollo 11 mission launch team, manages the new space DTN project.
Enlarge Photo
"Typically spacecraft go off and do their thing, gather up data, and then on some schedule they connect to the ground and [we] pull down the results of what it has been doing and send up instructions for the next time period," Hooke said.
Such manual operations are inefficient and expensive. But simply extending Earth's Internet into space won't work.
The Web uses Transmission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), a type of communication language in which hosts and computers must be constantly connected.
This rarely happens in space, where intermittent connections are the norm because of the vast distances involved and the tendency of orbiting moons, rotating planets, and drifting satellites to temporarily disrupt wireless lines of communication.
Communications Leap
Typical space delays, even those caused by solar storms, are handled in stride by DTN, Hooke said.
Each node in the network—whether it's the International Space Station or a small orbiting robot—stores all the data it receives until a clear opportunity arises to pass its "bundle" along to the others in the network. DTN nodes do not discard data when a destination path can't be identified.
Hooke likens this "store and forward" process to a basketball team systematically passing the ball downcourt to players closer to the hoop.
The result, he explained, will be a communications leap akin to that between the post office and the telephone.
"A letter is a pretty self-contained story, it says do this or order that, and you mail it off and wait for a response."
But the new DTN system will open a more consistent line of back-and-forth communication.
Edge of the Solar System
DTN is already used for earthbound projects.
Scientists, for instance, are using the system to tag and track wildlife with a data-delivery capacity far more reliable than past satellite-based networks.
DTN can also bring broadband Web to remote areas with few communication structures, connecting remote humans such as the Arctic's Sami people via satellite with far shorter time lags.
The U.S. military has also embraced the technology to help keep lines of communication open in remote areas—or when other infrastructure is destroyed.
So far, DTN doesn't seem to have a catch, experts say.
"There are no physical limits on where the protocols would stop working," Hooke said.
"We could use it to [send messages to] the edges of the solar system—the question is, how long will you wait for a response?" - GGL
Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News
July 9, 2009
For all its might, the World Wide Web is still limited to, well, our world.
But that's quickly changing with the advent of an "interplanetary internet" that planners say will revolutionize space communication.
Enlarge Photo
Printer Friendly
Email to a Friend
What's This?
SHARE
The Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) system, which entered another phase of testing this week, will allow astronauts to Google from the moon or tweet their observations from space.
But DTN provides far more than a connection to check your email. It's also essential for simplifying space command and control functions—such as power production or life-support systems—crucial for future space initiatives.
"You need an automated communications technology … to sustain planetary exploration on the scale that NASA and others want to perform over the next decade," said Kevin Gifford, a senior research associate at BioServe Space Technologies at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
"DTN enables the transition from a simple point-to-point network, like a walkie-talkie, to a true multimode network like the Internet."
After a decade of development DTN has advanced quickly over the past year, and NASA missions are planning to adopt the network by 2011. In November 2008 NASA test-drove the network by sending space images to and from the EPOXI spacecraft, some 20 million miles (32 million kilometers) from Earth.
DTN protocols were also installed on the International Space Station in May, and summer testing began the first week of July.
Houston, We're Fixing a Problem
Though tweeting astronauts have gotten a lot of press, "the reality is that they [don't really] tweet or have browsing capability on the International Space Station," explained Gifford, who is part of a large, cooperative DTN effort that has also included NASA and Internet veterans.
"Right now they actually voice down a simple blurb, and the tweet is operated manually from Houston," he said. In fact most current space communication involves humans manually scheduling each and every link, sometimes weeks or even months in advance for distant spacecraft, and dictating exactly which data are sent and when.
Adrian Hooke, a veteran of the Apollo 11 mission launch team, manages the new space DTN project.
Enlarge Photo
"Typically spacecraft go off and do their thing, gather up data, and then on some schedule they connect to the ground and [we] pull down the results of what it has been doing and send up instructions for the next time period," Hooke said.
Such manual operations are inefficient and expensive. But simply extending Earth's Internet into space won't work.
The Web uses Transmission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), a type of communication language in which hosts and computers must be constantly connected.
This rarely happens in space, where intermittent connections are the norm because of the vast distances involved and the tendency of orbiting moons, rotating planets, and drifting satellites to temporarily disrupt wireless lines of communication.
Communications Leap
Typical space delays, even those caused by solar storms, are handled in stride by DTN, Hooke said.
Each node in the network—whether it's the International Space Station or a small orbiting robot—stores all the data it receives until a clear opportunity arises to pass its "bundle" along to the others in the network. DTN nodes do not discard data when a destination path can't be identified.
Hooke likens this "store and forward" process to a basketball team systematically passing the ball downcourt to players closer to the hoop.
The result, he explained, will be a communications leap akin to that between the post office and the telephone.
"A letter is a pretty self-contained story, it says do this or order that, and you mail it off and wait for a response."
But the new DTN system will open a more consistent line of back-and-forth communication.
Edge of the Solar System
DTN is already used for earthbound projects.
Scientists, for instance, are using the system to tag and track wildlife with a data-delivery capacity far more reliable than past satellite-based networks.
DTN can also bring broadband Web to remote areas with few communication structures, connecting remote humans such as the Arctic's Sami people via satellite with far shorter time lags.
The U.S. military has also embraced the technology to help keep lines of communication open in remote areas—or when other infrastructure is destroyed.
So far, DTN doesn't seem to have a catch, experts say.
"There are no physical limits on where the protocols would stop working," Hooke said.
"We could use it to [send messages to] the edges of the solar system—the question is, how long will you wait for a response?" - GGL
Friday, July 10, 2009
San Andreas Ready for Big One?
Mysterious Tremors Detected Along San Andreas Fault
Friday, July 10, 2009
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LOS ANGELES — Scientists have detected a spike in underground rumblings on a section of California's San Andreas Fault that produced a magnitude-7.8 earthquake in 1857.
What these mysterious vibrations say about future earthquakes is far from certain. But some think the deep tremors suggest underground stress may be building up faster than expected and may indicate an increased risk of a major temblor.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, monitored seismic activity on the fault's central section between July 2001 and February 2009 and recorded more than 2,000 tremors. The tremors lasted mere minutes to nearly half an hour.
• Click here to visit FOXNews.com's Natural Science Center.
Unlike earthquakes, tremors occur deeper below the surface and the shaking lasts longer.
During the study period, two strong earthquakes hit — a magnitude-6.5 in 2003 and a magnitude-6.0 a year later. Scientists noticed the frequency of the tremors doubled after the 2003 quake and jumped six-fold after 2004.
Related StoriesScientists Lower Alaska Volcano Threat Level
Tremor episodes persist today. Though the frequency of tremors have declined since 2004, scientists are still concerned because they are still at a level that is twice as high as before the 2003 quake.
The team also recorded unusually strong rumblings days before the 2004 temblor.
Results of the research appear in Friday's issue of the journal Science. The work was funded by the U.S. Geological Survey and National Science Foundation.
"The fact that the tremors haven't gone down means the time to the next earthquake may come sooner," said Berkeley seismologist and lead researcher Robert Nadeau.
Nadeau first discovered tremors deep in the San Andreas Fault in 2005. Before that, the phenomenon was thought only to occur in Earth's subduction zones, where one tectonic plate dives beneath another.
USGS seismologist Susan Hough found the latest observations intriguing, but said it's too soon to know what they mean.
"We don't have enough data to know what the fault is doing in the long term," said Hough, who had no part in the research
Friday, July 10, 2009
ShareThis
LOS ANGELES — Scientists have detected a spike in underground rumblings on a section of California's San Andreas Fault that produced a magnitude-7.8 earthquake in 1857.
What these mysterious vibrations say about future earthquakes is far from certain. But some think the deep tremors suggest underground stress may be building up faster than expected and may indicate an increased risk of a major temblor.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, monitored seismic activity on the fault's central section between July 2001 and February 2009 and recorded more than 2,000 tremors. The tremors lasted mere minutes to nearly half an hour.
• Click here to visit FOXNews.com's Natural Science Center.
Unlike earthquakes, tremors occur deeper below the surface and the shaking lasts longer.
During the study period, two strong earthquakes hit — a magnitude-6.5 in 2003 and a magnitude-6.0 a year later. Scientists noticed the frequency of the tremors doubled after the 2003 quake and jumped six-fold after 2004.
Related StoriesScientists Lower Alaska Volcano Threat Level
Tremor episodes persist today. Though the frequency of tremors have declined since 2004, scientists are still concerned because they are still at a level that is twice as high as before the 2003 quake.
The team also recorded unusually strong rumblings days before the 2004 temblor.
Results of the research appear in Friday's issue of the journal Science. The work was funded by the U.S. Geological Survey and National Science Foundation.
"The fact that the tremors haven't gone down means the time to the next earthquake may come sooner," said Berkeley seismologist and lead researcher Robert Nadeau.
Nadeau first discovered tremors deep in the San Andreas Fault in 2005. Before that, the phenomenon was thought only to occur in Earth's subduction zones, where one tectonic plate dives beneath another.
USGS seismologist Susan Hough found the latest observations intriguing, but said it's too soon to know what they mean.
"We don't have enough data to know what the fault is doing in the long term," said Hough, who had no part in the research
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Monkey and Grammar
Now I am really embarassed at my bad grammar! - GGL
Monkeys Recognize Poor GrammarMatt Kaplan
for National Geographic News
July 8, 2009
Monkeys can form sentences and speak in accents—and now a new study shows that our genetic relatives can also recognize poor grammar.
"We were really curious whether monkeys could even detect the common trend found in human language to add sounds to word edges, like adding 'ed' in English to create the past tense," said lead study author Ansgar Endress, a linguist at Harvard University.
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Monkeys Use False Alarms to Scam Food?
Monkeys Use Baby Talk With Infants
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Previous research in cotton-top tamarins had shown that the animals can understand basic grammar, for instance, identifying which words logically follow other words in a sentence.
But that same study, published in the journal Science in 2004, found that monkeys did not understand complex grammar, such as when words in a sentence depend on each other but are separated.
While that study suggested monkeys were deaf to complex communication, the new research shows that tamarins can grasp at least one advanced concept: prefixes and suffixes.
Wordplay
For their study, Endress and colleagues played recordings of made-up English words to a population of captive cotton-top tamarins for roughly 30 minutes a day.
Half of the tamarins were exposed to words with a varied stem but a constant suffix (such as bi-shoy, mo-shoy, and lu-shoy). The other half were exposed to a constant prefix followed by a varied stem (such as shoy-bi, shoy-mo, and shoy-lu).
The following day, individual tamarins were brought into an observation enclosure equipped with an audio speaker and video-recording equipment to capture their behavior. These tamarins were then exposed to more words.
Many of the words followed the same language rules that the tamarins had heard the day before, with half hearing "shoy" as a suffix and half hearing it as a prefix.
However, every once in a while, the researchers would play a recording of an "incorrect" word. For instance, the speaker would broadcast "shoy" as a suffix when it had previously been presented as a prefix, or vice versa.
Mental Machinery
Other biologists who were not aware of the research question were asked to watch and note every time the small mammals turned their heads toward the speaker.
When tamarins were exposed to words that "broke" the rules they had learned, they looked toward the speaker in a startled manner, observers noted.
(Related: "Monkeys Can Subtract, Study Finds.")
The finding is dramatic, Endress explained, because it reveals that our distant cousins seem to have the mental machinery to identify verbal structures like suffixes and prefixes.
The research will appear this week in the journal Biology Letters
Monkeys Recognize Poor GrammarMatt Kaplan
for National Geographic News
July 8, 2009
Monkeys can form sentences and speak in accents—and now a new study shows that our genetic relatives can also recognize poor grammar.
"We were really curious whether monkeys could even detect the common trend found in human language to add sounds to word edges, like adding 'ed' in English to create the past tense," said lead study author Ansgar Endress, a linguist at Harvard University.
Enlarge Photo
Printer Friendly
Email to a Friend
What's This? SHARE
Digg
StumbleUpon
RELATED
Monkeys Use False Alarms to Scam Food?
Monkeys Use Baby Talk With Infants
Monkey Pictures
Previous research in cotton-top tamarins had shown that the animals can understand basic grammar, for instance, identifying which words logically follow other words in a sentence.
But that same study, published in the journal Science in 2004, found that monkeys did not understand complex grammar, such as when words in a sentence depend on each other but are separated.
While that study suggested monkeys were deaf to complex communication, the new research shows that tamarins can grasp at least one advanced concept: prefixes and suffixes.
Wordplay
For their study, Endress and colleagues played recordings of made-up English words to a population of captive cotton-top tamarins for roughly 30 minutes a day.
Half of the tamarins were exposed to words with a varied stem but a constant suffix (such as bi-shoy, mo-shoy, and lu-shoy). The other half were exposed to a constant prefix followed by a varied stem (such as shoy-bi, shoy-mo, and shoy-lu).
The following day, individual tamarins were brought into an observation enclosure equipped with an audio speaker and video-recording equipment to capture their behavior. These tamarins were then exposed to more words.
Many of the words followed the same language rules that the tamarins had heard the day before, with half hearing "shoy" as a suffix and half hearing it as a prefix.
However, every once in a while, the researchers would play a recording of an "incorrect" word. For instance, the speaker would broadcast "shoy" as a suffix when it had previously been presented as a prefix, or vice versa.
Mental Machinery
Other biologists who were not aware of the research question were asked to watch and note every time the small mammals turned their heads toward the speaker.
When tamarins were exposed to words that "broke" the rules they had learned, they looked toward the speaker in a startled manner, observers noted.
(Related: "Monkeys Can Subtract, Study Finds.")
The finding is dramatic, Endress explained, because it reveals that our distant cousins seem to have the mental machinery to identify verbal structures like suffixes and prefixes.
The research will appear this week in the journal Biology Letters
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Oldest Bible and Newest Tech
Oldest known Bible goes onlineStory
By Richard Allen Greene
LONDON, England (CNN) -- The world's oldest known Christian Bible goes online Monday -- but the 1,600-year-old text doesn't match the one you'll find in churches today.
The British government bought most of the pages of the ancient manuscript in 1933.
1 of 2 Discovered in a monastery in the Sinai desert in Egypt more than 160 years ago, the handwritten Codex Sinaiticus includes two books that are not part of the official New Testament and at least seven books that are not in the Old Testament.
The New Testament books are in a different order, and include numerous handwritten corrections -- some made as much as 800 years after the texts were written, according to scholars who worked on the project of putting the Bible online. The changes range from the alteration of a single letter to the insertion of whole sentences.
And some familiar -- very important -- passages are missing, including verses dealing with the resurrection of Jesus, they said.
Juan Garces, the British Library project curator, said it should be no surprise that the ancient text is not quite the same as the modern one, since the Bible has developed and changed over the years.
"The Bible as an inspirational text has a history," he told CNN.
"There are certainly theological questions linked to this," he said. "Everybody should be encouraged to investigate for themselves."
That is part of the reason for putting the Bible online, said Garces, who is both a Biblical scholar and a computer scientist.
"Scholars will want to look very closely at it, and some of the Web site functionality is specifically for them -- the ability to search the text, the ability to highlight a word, the degree of detail is particularly interesting for scholars interested in the text," he said.
But, he added, "It's for everyone, really a wide audience, because of curiosity, because they appreciate the value of it."
By the middle of the fourth century, when the Codex Sinaiticus was written, there was wide but not complete agreement on which books should be considered authoritative for Christian communities, according to the Web site where the Codex is posted.
The Bible comes from the Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai desert, where a scholar named Constantine Tischendorf recognized its significance in 1844 -- and promptly took part of it, Garces explained.
"Constantine Tischendorf was in search for ancient manuscripts, so he appreciated the age and value of it," Garces said.
He took a handful of pages to Germany to publish them, then returned in 1853 and in 1859 for more. On that last trip, he took 694 pages, which ended up in St. Petersburg, Russia.
The Soviet government decided to sell them in 1933 -- to raise money to buy tractors and other agricultural equipment.
The British government bought the pages for £100,000, raising half the money from the public. Garces called that event one of the first fundraising campaigns in British history.
Film footage from the time shows crowds of people turning out to see the manuscript, which was considered a national treasure, he said.
Though the Bible has been reassembled online, in the real world it remains scattered.
Most of it is in London. Eighty-six pages are held at the University Library in Leipzig, Germany, parts of 12 pages are held at the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg, and 24 pages and 40 fragments remain at St. Catherine's Monastery, recovered by the monks from the northern wall of the structure in June 1975.
The manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. (A copy held at the Vatican dates from about the same period.) Older copies of individual portions of the Christian Bible exist, but not as part of a complete text.
The Codex also includes much of the Old Testament that was adopted by early Greek-speaking Christians.
That portion includes books not found in the Hebrew Bible and regarded in the Protestant tradition as apocryphal, such as 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, 1 & 4 Maccabees, Wisdom and Sirach.
The New Testament portion includes the Epistle of Barnabas and The Shepherd of Hermas.
As it survives today, Codex Sinaiticus comprises just over 400 large leaves of parchment -- prepared animal skin -- each of which measures 15 inches by 13.6 inches (380 mm by 345 mm).
By Richard Allen Greene
LONDON, England (CNN) -- The world's oldest known Christian Bible goes online Monday -- but the 1,600-year-old text doesn't match the one you'll find in churches today.
The British government bought most of the pages of the ancient manuscript in 1933.
1 of 2 Discovered in a monastery in the Sinai desert in Egypt more than 160 years ago, the handwritten Codex Sinaiticus includes two books that are not part of the official New Testament and at least seven books that are not in the Old Testament.
The New Testament books are in a different order, and include numerous handwritten corrections -- some made as much as 800 years after the texts were written, according to scholars who worked on the project of putting the Bible online. The changes range from the alteration of a single letter to the insertion of whole sentences.
And some familiar -- very important -- passages are missing, including verses dealing with the resurrection of Jesus, they said.
Juan Garces, the British Library project curator, said it should be no surprise that the ancient text is not quite the same as the modern one, since the Bible has developed and changed over the years.
"The Bible as an inspirational text has a history," he told CNN.
"There are certainly theological questions linked to this," he said. "Everybody should be encouraged to investigate for themselves."
That is part of the reason for putting the Bible online, said Garces, who is both a Biblical scholar and a computer scientist.
"Scholars will want to look very closely at it, and some of the Web site functionality is specifically for them -- the ability to search the text, the ability to highlight a word, the degree of detail is particularly interesting for scholars interested in the text," he said.
But, he added, "It's for everyone, really a wide audience, because of curiosity, because they appreciate the value of it."
By the middle of the fourth century, when the Codex Sinaiticus was written, there was wide but not complete agreement on which books should be considered authoritative for Christian communities, according to the Web site where the Codex is posted.
The Bible comes from the Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai desert, where a scholar named Constantine Tischendorf recognized its significance in 1844 -- and promptly took part of it, Garces explained.
"Constantine Tischendorf was in search for ancient manuscripts, so he appreciated the age and value of it," Garces said.
He took a handful of pages to Germany to publish them, then returned in 1853 and in 1859 for more. On that last trip, he took 694 pages, which ended up in St. Petersburg, Russia.
The Soviet government decided to sell them in 1933 -- to raise money to buy tractors and other agricultural equipment.
The British government bought the pages for £100,000, raising half the money from the public. Garces called that event one of the first fundraising campaigns in British history.
Film footage from the time shows crowds of people turning out to see the manuscript, which was considered a national treasure, he said.
Though the Bible has been reassembled online, in the real world it remains scattered.
Most of it is in London. Eighty-six pages are held at the University Library in Leipzig, Germany, parts of 12 pages are held at the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg, and 24 pages and 40 fragments remain at St. Catherine's Monastery, recovered by the monks from the northern wall of the structure in June 1975.
The manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. (A copy held at the Vatican dates from about the same period.) Older copies of individual portions of the Christian Bible exist, but not as part of a complete text.
The Codex also includes much of the Old Testament that was adopted by early Greek-speaking Christians.
That portion includes books not found in the Hebrew Bible and regarded in the Protestant tradition as apocryphal, such as 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, 1 & 4 Maccabees, Wisdom and Sirach.
The New Testament portion includes the Epistle of Barnabas and The Shepherd of Hermas.
As it survives today, Codex Sinaiticus comprises just over 400 large leaves of parchment -- prepared animal skin -- each of which measures 15 inches by 13.6 inches (380 mm by 345 mm).
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Falling into a black hole
It took 100,000 lines of computer code to creat this video! Some people have too much time (and government funding!) on their hands! - GGL
Mississippi Fatties!
Mississippi's Still Fattest but Alabama Closing In
By LAURAN NEERGAARD AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON July 1, 2009 (AP)
Obesity report shows adults continue to pack on pounds in the U.S.Mississippi's still king of cellulite, but an ominous tide is rolling toward the Medicare doctors in neighboring Alabama: obese baby boomers. It's time for the nation's annual obesity rankings and, outside of fairly lean Colorado, there's little good news. In 31 states, more than one in four adults are obese, says a new report from the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
And obesity rates among adults rose in 23 states over the past year, and no state experienced a significant decline.
"The obesity epidemic clearly goes beyond being an individual problem," said Jeff Levi, executive director of the Trust, a nonprofit public health group.
It's a national crisis that "calls for a national strategy to combat obesity," added Robert Wood Johnson vice president Dr. James Marks. "The crest of the wave of obesity is still to crash."
Related
WATCH: Fat Town, Fit TownWeighing the Fattest and Fittest U.S. CitiesTop American Cities for Spring AllergiesWhile the nation has long been bracing for a surge in Medicare as the boomers start turning 65, the new report makes clear that fat, not just age, will fuel much of those bills. In every state, the rate of obesity is higher among 55- to 64-year-olds — the oldest boomers — than among today's 65-and-beyond.
The report provides one of the first in-depth looks at obese boomers, and its implications are sobering. This first wave of aging boomers will mean a jump of obese Medicare patients that ranges from 5.2 percent in New York to a high of 16.3 percent in Alabama, the report concluded. In Alabama, nearly 39 percent of the oldest boomers are obese.
By LAURAN NEERGAARD AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON July 1, 2009 (AP)
Obesity report shows adults continue to pack on pounds in the U.S.Mississippi's still king of cellulite, but an ominous tide is rolling toward the Medicare doctors in neighboring Alabama: obese baby boomers. It's time for the nation's annual obesity rankings and, outside of fairly lean Colorado, there's little good news. In 31 states, more than one in four adults are obese, says a new report from the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
And obesity rates among adults rose in 23 states over the past year, and no state experienced a significant decline.
"The obesity epidemic clearly goes beyond being an individual problem," said Jeff Levi, executive director of the Trust, a nonprofit public health group.
It's a national crisis that "calls for a national strategy to combat obesity," added Robert Wood Johnson vice president Dr. James Marks. "The crest of the wave of obesity is still to crash."
Related
WATCH: Fat Town, Fit TownWeighing the Fattest and Fittest U.S. CitiesTop American Cities for Spring AllergiesWhile the nation has long been bracing for a surge in Medicare as the boomers start turning 65, the new report makes clear that fat, not just age, will fuel much of those bills. In every state, the rate of obesity is higher among 55- to 64-year-olds — the oldest boomers — than among today's 65-and-beyond.
The report provides one of the first in-depth looks at obese boomers, and its implications are sobering. This first wave of aging boomers will mean a jump of obese Medicare patients that ranges from 5.2 percent in New York to a high of 16.3 percent in Alabama, the report concluded. In Alabama, nearly 39 percent of the oldest boomers are obese.
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